Virtual Pets Are Back: The Smartphone Version Of The ’90s Classic

If you followed the trends in the mid-90s, you may have had a virtual pet. I had one. It started out fun. It was a keychain with a poor-quality graphic of a dog on a tiny screen. You basically had to press some buttons on the screen a few times a day to feed or play with your virtual pet. The problem was, as time went on, virtual pets got older and more needy. Soon, I had to press those buttons once every two hours or my pet could die.

After setting my alarm to wake up every few hours at night in order to keep that damn thing alive, I finally came to my senses and realized how stupid it all was. I left that keychain, and my virtual dog, on a table in a public place one day when I couldn’t take it anymore. Either someone picked him up and kept him alive, or he died a few hours after that.

Looking back, that experience was the first time I can remember being addicted to technology. Just like people sit there and refresh their Facebook pages over and over again, some of us used to do that with virtual pets in the ’90s. Now you can relive all that fun (or insanity) with a virtual pet on your smartphone.

The app is called “Tamagotchi L.i.f.e,” (which stands for ‘love is fun everywhere’), and it’s available now for Android phones here on Google Play. It’s free, or you can pay 99 cents to have a version without all the ads. This Tamagotchi app is from Bandai, which is the original company that launched the famous virtual pets we all remember from back around 1997. Beware though. Ask anyone who had one of these things back then…it may drive you insane. My phone requires enough attention as it is, I can’t imagine having a dog on there that I have to feed every few hours.